A thought-experiment

Suppose there were two countries, often seen by each other and by the international community to be rivals, each very powerful and each with wide-ranging, often conflicting security concerns. A comparison of these countries is as follows:

• Nation R is a country with a very strong Christian heritage, which is recognised in its civil law and in its public schools. It is very expansive and very rich in mineral resources, including oil. It has a government many would consider authoritarian, but in recent years it has not waged aggressive warfare against its neighbours and has maintained some public order at home. Instead, it is threatened by terrorism, by an alliance of diametrically-opposed nations on its borders and in the international community, and by economic instability. At the same time, they dedicate what foreign resources they have to defending vulnerable populations against Islamist extremism and the extremisms of fascism, radical liberalism and communism. They may be doing so out of realistic concerns, or they may be doing so out of humanitarian and religious obligation; different officials and different people in this nation will tell you different things.
  
  
• Nation U is a country which makes no formal acknowledgement of a religious heritage, and instead enshrines an economic and social ideology of perpetual class warfare. It is also very expansive and very rich in mineral resources, including oil. It has a government widely hailed by its allies as democratic, but it is controlled to an unseemly degree by corporate interests and has engaged in aggressive warfare far afield. Though the government loudly proclaims to be against terrorism and extremism in all its forms, the recipients of this government’s aid include ultranationalists, radicals and extremists abroad, usually through private foundations or through its intelligence agency. If you ask the officials and citizens of this society what they believe the foreign-policy motivations of their government are, a solid majority will believe that their nation is guided by democratic principles rather than by security interests.

It should be apparent that I am speaking of Russia and the United States here, but the debates I have seen on Syria (and indeed on Russia herself) have been saddening in terms of their lack of critical thinking regarding who the protesters are and what they actually want. It is entirely possible that what the Russian protestors want is something positive, just as it is entirely possible that comes out of such regime change in a handful of the nations affected by the Arab Spring will ultimately be positive, if some semblance of public order can be maintained and liberties for vulnerable minority groups can be protected (and in Ægypt that appears the most likely at present). But unless we know for sure what ends we want to achieve by our protests, we will continue to be manipulated the official narrative: a manufactured rather than a sincere idealism which sees a formalistic procedural liberalism at the expense of all else (including the religious freedoms of minorities and the economic rights of all to a decent living) as the ultimate aim.

The Islamists who, as I write, are committing atrocities in Libya and who are awaiting their chance to do so in Syria are hailed as the heroes of a narrative of reform driven by high-minded democratic sentiment.

On the other hand, the peaceful protestors in Greece, in Spain, in Romania and in the United States are portrayed as greedy, resentful, filthy, ignorant moochers who don’t know that the suffering caused by neoliberalism and fiscal austerity mandates from on high build character and should getajobdammit.

Some perspective, please. Please. Please.